Claiming Visibility

When you enter Vancouver-based artist Carmen Papalia’s exhibition, Guidelines, at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Alta., you’re confronted by multiple images of yourself and, perhaps, other visitors.

This hall of reflections consists of freestanding mirrored columns. A red string runs around and among them at about chest height, creating a web of intersecting lines. Visitors may use the string as a tactile or visual guide through a small maze with various dead ends. 

Indecipherable audio fills the air. The visual and physical effect of watching oneself appear in multiples at different angles is fun, engaging and possibly disorienting – but if you haven’t read the text on the wall outside, the conceptual frame may not be clear.

The next room offers context via a three-channel animated video installation accompanied by a narrative by Papalia. The images – created collaboratively with artist Heather Kai Smith, who teaches at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University – are all in red and give the appearance of line drawings or quick sketches, but in motion. 

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Carmen Papalia and Heather Kai Smith, “Open Access: Claiming Visibility,” 2019

foreground installation, and Carmen Papalia, “Red String,” 2015, installation at rear (courtesy the artists, photo by Jessica Wittman)

Images shift from screen to screen. One features people walking in single file, each with a hand on the shoulder ahead. Another shows hands at play, passing an object that’s hard to identify – a ball, perhaps, or a piece of rumpled cloth. There’s also a circle of people fluttering what looks like a parachute. 

The images are based on archival documentation of disability rights protests, including the 504 Sit-In, a 1977 protest that saw activists occupy U.S. federal buildings to press the government to issue delayed regulations for Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which outlawed exclusion from federally funded programs and services.

The audio in this room foregrounds Papalia’s voice, which alternates with female narrators, against a backdrop of random sounds – footsteps and fragments of speech as well as banging, tapping and shuffling. 

Papalia, who has exhibited his work internationally at the Tate Liverpool and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, describes a hospital visit due to sickle cell, a disease of the red blood cells that creates pain and visual impairment. In the narrative, he says he was once refused treatment because an emergency room doctor thought he was seeking drugs. This, and other encounters, led him to articulate a position on “accessibility as a social practice.” 

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Heather Kai Smith, “Open Access: Claiming Visibility,” 2019

installation view (courtesy the artist, commissioned by Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, photo by Jessica Wittman)

The exhibition, on view until Aug. 25, explores a concept Papalia calls “open access,” a manifesto of five tenets that respond to the loss of agency he experienced as well as the fact that vision isn’t his “central reference point” and his realization that these issues could be incorporated into his artistic work.

Papalia calls himself a non-visual learner, a term he prefers to blind or visually impaired, which he views as medicalizing terms. His manifesto is essentially a set of guidelines, referred to in his choice of the show’s title.

When Papalia told blind friends about his work, he was surprised to realize many had never been to a museum, nor made art, as art spaces privilege visuality and thereby exclude non-visual individuals. He extrapolates that such people “could not represent themselves or share their stories with the wider public … they were disabled not by their bodies but by the disabling attitudes of institutions (artistic, social, medical, etc.) that restrained their agency.” 

The exhibition’s final component, in a large darkened space, foregrounds tactility with five framed drawings by Smith that show hands playing cat’s cradle. Perhaps the intention is metaphorical, suggesting interconnection, blood flow and reliance on touch, and exemplifying how simplicity – just string and hands – can lead to complexity. The irony, of course, is that you have to be sighted to appreciate them.

Overall, the show engages sight, hearing and touch to varying degrees. But, most effectively, it engages the privileged mind and leads to new understandings of buried biases. ■

Guidelines is on view at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Alta., from June 15 to Aug. 25, 2019.

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